邓小平社会主义市场经济思想演进的制度创新与路径优化

邓小平认为计划和市场都是手段、方法、没有社会制度属性的内在规定性,提出了建设社会主义市场经济体制的目标。从邓小平社会主义市场经济思想演变路径来看,改革的实践是在不断提升市场经济在社会主义建设中的意义和作用,在实践中越来越依靠市场来配置资源。其演进过程遵循着渐进式制度变迁规律,在实践中,现实的制度创新和演进将受到两个方面的成本约束：与某项制度安排的共同信念的形成、普及、修正和摒弃相关的学习成本和实施成本。在学习成本和实施成本约束下,邓小平社会主义市场经济思想演进的制度变迁和演化路径在区域之间不可能是一致的,而是多样性的。     

Do ‘soft law’ board gender quotas work? Evidence from a natural experiment

In a new era of “open governance”, in which societal and corporate change is taking place, 15 predominantly European countries, including Spain, enacted board gender quotas to increase the share of women on boards. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of the European Union’s first “soft” quota – the 2007 Spanish Gender Equality Act recommending all large public and private Spanish firms to appoint a target of 40 percent of each gender to serve as board directors by 2015. The Act provides an incentive in that quota compliant firms may receive a preference for the tendering of public contracts. We draw on institutional and resource dependency theories to motivate the first empirical test of a “soft” quota which is distinct from Norway’s “hard law” board gender quota, and more similar to the proposed EU-wide quota. Using a large novel panel of 767 Spanish firms and 2786 firm-year observations from 2005 to 2014, we exploit the Spanish Act as a natural experiment and employ a difference-in-differences model. We find that less than nine percent of targeted firms fully comply with the quota. Firms that depend on public contracts are significantly more likely to increase female representation, although quota compliant firms do not actually benefit from the Act’s potential incentive. The results highlight the Spanish government’s lack of commitment to the quota, and that the quota’s normative obligations did not trigger the adoption of gender-balanced boards.     

School ethnic diversity and White students’ civic attitudes in England

The current paper focuses on White British students in lower secondary education and investigates the effect of school ethnic diversity on their levels of trust and inclusive attitudes towards immigrants. Use is made of panel data of the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (CELS) to explore these relationships. Ethnic diversity is measured with the proportion of students in a grade identifying with a minority. In agreement with contact theory, the paper initially finds a positive relation between diversity and inclusive attitudes on immigrants. However, this link disappears once controls for social background, gender and prior levels of the outcome are included in the model. This indicates that students with particular pre-enrolment characteristics have self-selected in diverse schools and that inclusive attitudes have stabilized before secondary education. Diversity further appears to have a negative impact on trust, irrespective of the number of controls added to the model.     

Relational diversity and neighbourhood cohesion. Unpacking variety,balance and in-group size

Ethnic diversity is typically measured by the well-known Hirschman-Herfindahl Index. This paper discusses the merits of an alternative approach, which is in our view better suited to tease out why and how ethnic diversity matters. The approach consists of two elements. First, all existing diversity indices are non-relational. From the viewpoint of theoretical accounts that attribute negative diversity effects to in-group favoritism and out-group threat, it should however matter whether, given a certain level of overall diversity, an individual belongs to a minority group or to the dominant majority. We therefore decompose diversity by distinguishing the in-group share from the diversity of ethnic out-groups. Second, we show how generalized entropy measures can be used to test which of diversity’s two basic dimensions matters most: the variety of groups, or the unequal distribution (balance) of the population over groups. These measures allow us to test different theoretical explanations against each other, because they imply different expectations regarding the effects of in-group size, out-group variety, and out-group balance. We apply these ideas in an analysis of various social cohesion measures across 55 German localities and show that both in-group size and out-group diversity matter. For the native majority as well as for persons of immigration background, the variety component of diversity seems to be more decisive than has formerly been acknowledged. These findings provide little support for group threat and in-group favoritism as the decisive mechanisms behind negative diversity effects, and are most in line with the predictions of theories that emphasize coordination problems, asymmetric preferences, and network closure.     

One size does not fit all: organisational diversity in New Zealand tertiary sector ethics committees

New Zealand tertiary ethics committees may work from similar ethical principles but this article demonstrates that the way in which they operate is idiosyncratic. The paper builds on commentaries offered by current or former members of five New Zealand ethics committees on the organisation and practices of their committees. It examines differences among the committees with the aim of initiating an ongoing conversation about the work of ethics committees in the New Zealand context. It argues for the merits of diversity, transparency and openness as core principles for the work of ethics committees and as a platform for dealing with critique.     

Being a teacher with a so-called ‘immigrant background’: challenges of dealing with social boundaries

ABSTRACT

There have been calls in many European countries to diversify the teaching staff as a response to increasing diversity within student populations. These calls are often based on underlying assumptions that teachers with a migration history are well placed to act as ‘intercultural mediators’ and ‘role models’ for successful integration. However, these assumptions often lack differentiation. The presented study addresses this lack of differentiation for the case of the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Based on social constructivist theory (Barth; Wimmer) and pursuing a qualitative-hermeneutical approach (Schütze; Rosenthal), the study shows four ideal types of dealing with social boundary dynamics among teachers who have been categorised or labelled in terms of a ‘second immigrant generation’. Additionally, the study provides insight that (a) the category of ‘labour migration’ is experienced as a particularly significant category of boundary making and (b) that schools in urban-immigrant neighbourhoods – in contrast to those in rural-non-immigrant neighbourhoods – are experienced as places with an increased chance of recognition for a teacher ‘with an immigrant background’, although even there, these teachers find themselves in constant engagement to defend their belonging and to justify their sensitivity in dealing with migration-related diversity.     

蛋白质中钙离子结合残基的识别

钙结合蛋白在诸多重要的生命进程中实现着不可替代的生物学功能。而这些功能的实现,均取决于蛋白质中配体结合残基与钙离子的相互作用。因此,对蛋白质中钙离子结合残基的识别是理解这种重要分子机制的有效手段。建立了396条非冗余蛋白质链共包含1952个钙离子结合残基的钙离子结合蛋白数据集,通过统计分析确定以17个氨基酸残基作为最佳片段长度。使用10交叉检验,以氨基酸组分为特征参数的离散增量算法的预测精度为62.4%,相关系数为0.25;以位点氨基酸保守性信息为特征参数的矩阵打分算法的预测精度为69.9%,相关系数为0.40;以离散增量值、矩阵打分值和自协方差值为特征参数的支持向量机算法的预测精度为75.0%,相关系数为0.50。     

Deaf and hard of hearing faculty in higher education: enhancing access,equity, policy,and practice

Higher education institutions are often well prepared in terms of accommodation policies and practices for disabled students. Ironically, campuses are often not prepared once disabled academics return as faculty. Most are particularly unfamiliar with the unique access needs of deaf or hard of hearing academics. This can result in career hindrances to employment and tenure, as well as potential losses to campuses in terms of diversity. Background and substantiation on this access issue is provided along with recommendations for policy-making and practices for campuses that are geared to ensuring career success for deaf and hard of hearing faculty.     

Entropic representation and estimation of diversity indices

This paper serves a twofold purpose. First, a unified perspective on diversity indices is introduced based on an entropic basis. It is shown that the class of all linear combinations of the entropic basis, referred to as the class of linear diversity indices, covers a wide range of diversity indices used in the literature. Second, a class of estimators for linear diversity indices is proposed and it is shown that these estimators have rapidly decaying biases and asymptotic normality.